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On the night her elimination aired, Jane Dont was in Las Vegas. She was performing at a local gay nightclub, Piranha, which was co-hosted by a queen who didn’t know what was going to happen. The public didn’t know either. I knew Jane. She’d known for a year.
“Watching it again was probably the worst part,” she says now, calling via Zoom from Seattle, a hoodie pulled over her forehead, her cat climbing into the frame. She had been home for three days — a rare period of stillness in a life that had suddenly become very noisy. The drag queen from Spokane, Wash., the favorite to win this season’s crown, is still clearly processing her stunning elimination in the stand-up challenge that may prove her undoing.
“I did the emotional work to process how things went. But while I was watching the movie, I didn’t have a lot of information, because we didn’t see each other’s scenes. And I didn’t even see my own scene. So there were a lot of questions about what the judges were talking about on stage,” she says.
This disorientation – performing blindly, judging something you never got to see – is the focus of “Jane No.” She’ll also tell you that this is completely beside the point.
The facts are almost ridiculous when we look back. Jane has not been placed at the top for the first ten weeks in a row RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 18. She won three of those challenges. This was the strongest track record not only of the season but of the entire franchise. No queen in the history of the show has ever done that before.
She arrived polished, prepared and a little terrified. She proceeded to dismantle the competition week after week – while quietly breaking down in confessionals.
There was the episode where she cried because she was feeling so good. She laughs about it now, but only a little. “It’s funny, and it’s completely fake on some level,” she says. “But I really don’t know how to account for that kind of reaction. I’ve never been the person where everyone says, ‘You’re amazing.’ And so to be in a position where I felt like that was the turn that things were going to take was really stressful.”
“I didn’t grow up in an environment where I was constantly told I was great. That was never my mindset,” she says.
She attributes this to her upbringing. Her grandmothers were teachers. Her grandparents were military. Her father ran a working-class ski school. Her childhood spirit was not flattering; It was a correction. There is always something to fix, and always something to do better. She had internalized it so completely that even when the judges were giving her the win, part of her mind was looking for what was wrong.
“juicy [Love Dion, my season 18 competitor] “He always said that when we did the guided tours, ‘Jane is the only person Rue talks to as a colleague,'” she recalls. RuPaul would ask her what she was planning to do in the challenge; “You’ll be fine.”
“I connected with her a lot,” says Jane carefully. “I think she really enjoyed me. I just think about that moment.” [of my elimination]She’s the host of the show. “Sometimes she has to make a decision.”
***
The challenge that ended her career was called “Karens Gone Wild.” The five remaining queens were asked to perform stand-up scenes in front of RuPaul, playing variations of the “Karen” archetype — the white woman who screams, demands to speak to a manager, calls the cops, and uses her tears as a weapon.
Jane did not find the hypothesis morally repulsive. You say it clearly, then immediately try to take it back, and then say it again anyway. She was there. “My friends were being tear gassed in the street. I was gassed by the police. Every night the air was still difficult to breathe and hot because the police were gassing the entire neighborhood,” she recalls.
And in 2020, during the George Floyd uprisings, Seattle became one of the country’s most volatile flashpoints. The chaotic area — the CHOP District — was just blocks from her home. She went out to protest every day. She says that the videos that spread widely during that period were not comedic for her, but rather they were evidence.
“I don’t think a white woman crying and using her anger or tears as a weapon against people is particularly funny. I have a lot of residual baggage with that,” she explained.
None of this is an excuse, she insists. “I’m not saying I’m better than a challenge. It’s Raw’s show. She chooses challenges.” But she went into it unable to find joy, and built her own Karen as Christopher Guest’s character – intelligent, determined, and acting – in a challenge that required chaos.
Drag racing Judge Michelle Visage told her she was trying to control the scene. She acknowledges the criticism, but when she stood on that stage, she never saw the footage that led to the criticism. As far as she can remember, she did her best with what the script provided.
“I think I personally didn’t feel like I was getting much work done with Rue as a scene partner,” she says. “So I based it on the story I had built up in my mind. But yeah, I don’t think any drag competition is judged fairly in quotes. It’s not the Olympics. There’s no score sheet.”
She went on to lip-sync against Nene Cuoco in Lady Gaga’s “Garden of Eden.” wheels. Backflips. Everything she had. Nene stayed. Jane moved away.
She doesn’t call it unfair. She seems almost sensitive to the word. “No one deserves to win Drag racing“No one has the right to win,” she says firmly. The show never presented itself as having a very objective stance. Rue herself says: The final decision is hers. She stops. “Is any sweepstakes fair? What is fair when you judge something completely subjectively?
However, there is one thing she will say, and she’s said it in every interview since: She believes her track record is working against her. “I have prepared myself for a more difficult challenge by consistently performing well. My criticism of Karen’s challenge basically boils down to: ‘We expected more from you.’ “We know you can do more.” While the criticism from others was basically: “We thought you were going to do poorly, and then you didn’t.”
“The only episode where I decided to let go of my neuroticism — to trust my talent, and just believe in it — was the episode where I got eliminated,” she says. “I think I was right. I think if I let my guard down for even a moment, the ax would fall.”
In the weeks leading up to her elimination airing, Jane Don’t delivered one of the most impressive performances the show’s base has seen in years. She teased via social media that something is coming. Revelation. The Internet—which had been filled with years of Cherry Pie-style scandals and alumni drama—began to mine. What did you do?
Answer: Nothing. She was “annoying,” according to a faction of fans and former contestants like Monét X Change and Bob the Drag Queen. That was it. Purchase the item.
“The merchandise was almost an afterthought,” she says. “We created it in two days. What I was really doing was holding up a mirror to the way that certain segments of the fandom talk about all of us. I felt like I was being dragged through the mud by alumni and fans about my personality. The whole thing was a referendum on whether I was too much of a fan. And I just thought, I don’t think being annoying is a big deal.“
So she chose to have it. “If someone acknowledged that what people are saying is true, that would take the wind out of their sails,” Jane says. “What’s so funny is the people who were still upset even after I revealed it was nothing. They searched the entire gay website for something I had done wrong and couldn’t find anything. Then some of them got upset that I was joking about it.”
“So you’re angry because I’m actually a very decent person who cares about her business? I don’t know,” she adds.
***
I went to musical theater school. Seven years of vocal lessons. “I’ve spent a lot of the last few years yelling at gay people in bars, so I’m probably a bit more Tom Waits than Sutton Foster at this point, but I can sing, yeah,” she says.
Broadway. writing. Mainstream comedy. She wants it all, and she’s clear-eyed enough to see that her elimination, painful as it was, may have given her something that winning couldn’t.
“If I had won, there would have been a very large group of people calling it ‘predictable’, saying the season was ‘Boring’, saying I was just playing in front of the refs.’ ‘When you win, there’s a whole crowd of anti-people who show up. While being the Stolen Queen has strengthened a level of support that may have been there before, it has not calcified. And now there’s this excitement to see me back. Excitement to get out and see me on the road. Otherwise, it might not exist.”
She stops. “I’m not stupid. At the end of the day, this whole thing – it’s kind of a gift.”
Her cat is still there, insisting, squeezing her arm. She’s been away for a long time. She has three days at home. She’s 33 and aches when she wakes up, takes sleep vitamins, and performs at 1:30 a.m. in cities she’s never lived in, in front of audiences she found four months ago and who feel, somehow, like they’ve known her forever.
She let her guard down once. She says she was right to be afraid. And yet, here she is anyway, talking about it, making it funny, making it mean something. The show gave her a story that she thought was neat: the neurotic, perfectionist character who couldn’t get out of her own way. What I didn’t realize was that she was paying attention the whole time. It always was like that.
